BECUZZI, GIANLUCA (KINETIX) Memory Makes Noise (Small Voices) cd 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We managed to get a small handful of these from a distributor, they're priced super cheap, as the label has since folded, so these are the very last copies we'll ever be able to get, and we just have SIX of theseÉ
We reviewed a double disc by this Italian composer a while back (we still have a very few copies left!), working under the name Kinetix, which was a heady chunk of musique concrete, that definitely owed much to Lucier, Ashley and Ferrari, and while his approach seems to be similar here, the sounds are definitely distinctly different, Becuzzi offering up a series of sonic palindromes and recurring phrases, beginning with an anerated dronescaping, one that takes after The Hafler Trio who in turn was looking to Roland Kayn, long stretches of hushed static, and garbled muted thrum, peppered with bursts of white noise, soft swells of industrial whir, at least initially, eventually, the drones recede leaving what sounds like a scratchy violin playing mournfully inside some abandoned warehouse, laced with distant tinklings, bits of mysterious spoken word, and a final burst of staticky buzz. That's just the first track. The second track offers up some dark rumblings, pockmarked with bits of click and glitch, and over the course of its 18 minutes, slips from differently textured drones, deep low hum, high end flitter, and laces these long sprawls with melancholy trumpet bleats, long stretches of near silence, and thick cavernous blackened drones that evolve into strangely decaying symphonies of creak and crumble. Finally, the disc finishes off with the prettiest of the bunch, still super varied, and constantly shifting, but this time the various elements are more tranquil and serene, slipping into an almost lullaby at one point, but elsewhere offering up glistening streaks of barely there high end, swoonsome chamber like streaks, washed out muted shards of feedback, and lovely fields of metallic shimmer. A challenging listen for sure, but also quite rewarding, and quite lovely in their own abstract non-traditional way.
MPEG Stream: "Untitled 3"

BEE MASK Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Chris Madak is the man behind the Bee Mask, a project with several dozen cassette releases issued over the past couple of years. Madak should also be noted as the principle behind the exceptionally curated Deception Island tape label, which had the foresight to release Oneohtrix Point Never's Betrayed In The Octagon as well as a handful of killer Emeralds related side projects. That said, not much from Bee Mask's own discography has made it through here, with blister popping electrical noise and synth sequencing seeming to be par for the course. Yet through those circuit bent experiments, Bee Mask emerges fully evolved as a master synthesist of all things elekronische and kosmische circa 1975. Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico is a wonderfully varied album whose hallucinatory narratives speak to a purposeful and thoroughly intelligent design in its creation. Throughout you'll hear distinct references to the likes of Roland Kayn, Tangerine Dream (e.g. Electronic Meditations), Jean-Claude Eloy, Francoise Bayle, anything from Sky Records you could think of in the mid to late '70s, and even the more bombastic electronic interludes offered by Pink Floyd for that matter. The album opens in a more studied fashion through a sequence of carillion bell tones backmasked with a series of soft vocal grunts and gradually building set of electronic percolations, but all of this is engulfed in a tidal wave of polydactyl synth sequencing and brainfried electronic percolations only to morph again into a cavernous expanse of elongated tone and drone. The album's numerous detours and labyrinthine structures twist and devolve constantly across both sides of the record, delving into melodic phrasing in the electronic sequences only to shift deftly into plunging electrical vibrations of pulsing synth noise and delirious crescendos popping throughout.
The fact that John Elliott of Emeralds has brought this to vinyl after a release on Gift Tapes a while back should not go unnoticed. Spectrum Spools is his new imprint, released through Editions Mego, and this should be a label not to be missed. Certainly not this release, that's for sure.

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) cd 16.98
NOW ON CD!!!
Here stands the monumental sonic anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Deducted From Your Share In Paradise"
MPEG Stream: "Askion Kataskion Lix Tetrax Damnameneus Aision"
MPEG Stream: "Stop The Night"
MPEG Stream: "Scarlet Thread, Golden Cord"

BEE MASK Elegy For Beach Friday (Spectrum Spools) 2lp 27.00
BACK IN STOCK!!
Here stands the monumental gatefold double vinyl anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!

BEEQUEEN A Touch of Brimstone (Korm Plastics) cd 16.98
"A Touch Of Brimstone" was intended to be the 10th anniversary release for the Dutch ambient / industrial duo Beequeen (Frans De Waard and Freek Kinkelaar), but the nature of Beequeen's extensive side projects delayed the anniversary by almost 4 years. Nevertheless, this album collects a number of (mostly) unreleased tracks from 1989 to 1995, with the one previously released track coming from their debut recording "Scala Destillans" which was issued in a whopping pressing of 250 copies. The Beequeen sound has been and probably will always be a synthesis of a number of pre-existing ideas. At this time, those references for Beequeen were the phasing ambience of Klaus Schultz and Brian Eno, the isolationist practices of Maeror Tri, the clinical feedback noise of early SPK, and the magickal psychedelia of the Legendary Pink Dots. Thus, soft drones, ghosts of songs, and distant drum machine pulsatsions structure Beequeen's ongoing activities.
RealAudio clip: "A Touch Of Brimstone"

BEEQUEEN Der Holzweg (Tantric Harmonies) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This happens to be the fourth and most comprehensive edition of the best album from Beequeen, the ephemeral drone project spearheaded by Frans de Waard and Freek Kinkelaar. Der Holzweg was originally released by Anomalous Records back in 1993, housing the disc in a smartly designed wooden sleeve. At the same time, a tiny cassette edition made its way into the world. Many years, later a vinyl edition of the material was issued; and now the Russian imprint Tantric Harmonies has thankfully reissued this album once again, with all of bonus material found on the cassette and vinyl versions as well as three additional tracks from some contemporary seven inches. Whew! Beequeen's musical output is emblematic of the dreamy, soft focus ambience that emerged out of a post-industrial framework back in the early '90s. Zoviet France, Paul Schutze, O Yuki Conjugate, Christoph Heemann, and Cranioclast were some of the more obvious influences on Beequeen, whose backwards masked guitars and ambling tape loops flicker across grey, synthetic drones. It's very nice to see this back in print, one more time!
MPEG Stream: "Dead Hares"
MPEG Stream: "Chorok"

BEEQUEEN Gund (Plinky Plonk) cd 16.98
Beequeen is the duo of Freek Kinkelaar and Frans De Waard, whose name you might recognise from his other projects, Goem, Shifts, Kapotte Muziek and a bunch more. Can't say I have been all the taken with most of De Waard's projects, but for some reason Beequeen records always hit the spot. The sound of Beequeen has been anything but static, with two musically restless souls exploring all aspects of sound and recording, coming up with extremely varied results, most actually quite appealing, but Gund, a collection of old unreleased tracks finds Beequeen at what I think is their perfect sound, dreamy drony, hypnotic, minimal throbbing shimmerscapes of dark rumbles, ethereal wisps of high end incandescence, and subtly shifting, distant low end murmurs of rustle and thrum, that will most definitely tickle the cochlea of even the most discerning of drones fans, and of course folks who can't get enough Coleclough, Mirror, and the like. This collection assembles four tracks from a proposed 12" where all four tracks were to be cut at different speeds, 16, 33, 45, and 78 RPM (eventually scrapped due to the difficulty in pressing such a record) as well as two tracks from an aborted collaborative split with MSBR. Really beautiful stuff. Limited to 500!
MPEG Stream: "For Daniel In The Lion's Mouth"
MPEG Stream: "I'll Call You Claude"

BEEQUEEN Music For The Head Ballet (Infraction) cd 11.98

BEEQUEEN Ownliness (Infraction) cd 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Beequeen is but one of the many sides to Frans De Waard - the Dutch vangardist who has also explored post-techno minimalism in Goem, blissful guitar drone work in Shifts, musique concrete in Kapotte Muziek, and about a half-dozen other smaller projects. As with all of those aforementioned projects, De Waard typically follows the lead of a 'trendy' line in experimental music -- PanSonic, Main, Pierre Henry, etc. For Beequeen, it's a little more vague, originally taking off from the Legendary Pink Dots (as De Waard met fellow Beequeen member Freek Kinkelaar out of their mutual admiration of Ka-Spel and Co.), but more recently picking up cues from the Temporary Residence aesthetic of quiet guitar led introspection and moody post-rock atmospheres espoused by Sonna and Tarentel. As with the majority of the De Waard projects, Beequeen mimics its influences remarkably well.
RealAudio clip: "My Wicked Wicked Ways"
RealAudio clip: "Beam Ends"

BEEQUEEN Sandancing (Important Records) cd 14.98
Frans De Waard and Freek Kinkelaar have been very active in the Dutch experimental sound community for well over two decades in far too many projects to count. Beequeen was one of those projects, having originally producing some lovely post-Eno driftwork ambient pieces; yet, over the past three album, De Waard and Kinkelaar have steadily pulled atmospheric songs and folk structures out of that ambience. Sandancing is the latest venture and really seems to be mining the same skeletal songwriting as Low had on Secret Name. It doesn't hurt that the two have recruited vocalist Olga Wallis to join their project, as she's got a voice eerily similar to Low's Mimi Parker.
MPEG Stream: "Breathe"
MPEG Stream: "The Honeythief"

BEEQUEEN The Bodyshop (Important) cd 13.98

MPEG Stream: "Sad Sheep"
MPEG Stream: "The Dream-O-Phone"

BEFORE, AFTER s/t (Monorail Trespassing) cassette 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Before, After is a collaboration between Mike Pollard (Pale Blue Sky, Treetops, the owner of Arbor Records), and Jon Borges (Pedestrian Deposit, Emaciator, the owner of Monorail Trespassing), the two working together bring to the table their mutual aesthetic appreciation for a world of post-noise dronescaping. In the cold oscillations of electrical hum and arcs of dual-tone ambience from all sorts of synths, pedals, and whatnot, it's easy to put these sounds in the orbit of Emeralds / Outer Space / Mist / etc.
Pollard and Borges affix a fluctuating halo of electricity to all of their subtle oscillations, and all of this voltage, wattage, and ampage is somewhat threatening, but presented at a relatively safe distance. Sort of like a live wire that's been dropped into a pool of water. The thrum and glow is seductive, but deadly to the touch. This isn't to say these tones are the stuff of death ambient engineers, more just to marvel at the amount of electricity that has been wrangled, harnessed, and turned inward to provide a radiance that's somewhat beautiful, as captured in emergent, ethereal fluctuations and accretive drones swarming into a series of Jeck / Basinski loops. Another exceptional tape from what has become the preeminent cassette label in the US.

BEHEMOTHAUR Darkcrystal (200mg) cd-r 8.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's funny that we mentioned the Dead C in describing the last blackened missive from the mysterious outfit known as Behemothaur, since we later discovered that there was in fact a definite New Zealand noise rock connection. Some very well know dudes from some very well known NZ outfits (well, at least around here) apparently spend their nights lurking in caves, and in dark woods, performing unholy blacknoise rituals, the latest of which is presented here in all it's filthy, hellish buzzing droning noisedrenched glory.
While Behmeothaur is presented as a sort of outsider black metal project, they really hew closer to good old noise rock, or some sort of post industrial freerock. The darker dronier tracks sound a lot like the various members musical day jobs, soundscapes of rumbles and whirs, shimmering and throbbing expanses of crumbling low end, the sound that has become ubiquitous among cd-r labels. That said, these guys do add some blackness, some serious grimnity, their own take on the abstract drone is appropriately dense and heavy.
Then there's the other side of the band, their more 'rock' side, more abstractly 'metal', and this is where the bands NZ noise lineage really shows. Huge grinding slabs of blown out, slightly blackened lurching noise rock, the guitars ugly filthy squalls, the bass a rib cage rattling throb, the drums blown out and chaotic, the entire sound so in the red, the production sounds like another instrument, the Dead C are of course an obvious comparison, so is Wolf Eyes, a massive crumbling noisy doomy dirge.
The band do spit out a brief blast of buzzing blackness near the end of the disc, but even then it's so doused in fuzz and hiss the fidelity is so low, that again it ends up sounding like some super obscure nineties noiserock outfit, albeit with some definite blackened tendencies.
Awesome stuff, just fair warning to black metallers to be prepared for some abstract noise, but the rest of you, who are into all that sort of cd-r style droning and bashing and buzzing, this will obviously, and summarily kick your ass.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Packaged in a cool oversized screenprinted cardstock sleeve, with creepy red ink blood splatters all over the front, inside a 12 page printed black and white booklet packed with creepy images and some liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "Deadchant I"
MPEG Stream: "Thenameofthesilenthorizon"

BEHEMOTHAUR Necroglacial Enema (Faunasabbatha) cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Found 6 more copies of this fantastically fucked up
noisy heavy blackened and chaotic cd-r. WAY out of print, these are most definitely the last copies...
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
The first in the series comes from the very strangely named Behemothaur, and their even more strangely named record Necroglacial Enema. With a name like Necroglacial Enema, you might expect this to be a joke, some sort of goofy pisstake on black metal, but there's nothing finny about these three songs. All three are dense and heavy and noisy and chaotic. The opener, the shortest of the three, clocking in at 8+ minutes, is the noisiest of the bunch, the drums blown out and in the red like a rehearsal recording, the guitars moaning and keening, lots of crumbling low end and squealing feedback, there might be riffs but if so, they're hard to follow, instead it sounds more like some noise rock blow out. Dead C, Harry Pussy, locking into stumbling jams, hurling cymbals, blowing speakers, all maybe wreathed in just a bit of murky blackness.
The second track, clocking in at a whopping 21 minutes, is a strange looped guitarscape, coruscating angular chiming crunch, looped into grinding arcs of moaning guitar howl, like jagged shards of Keiji Haino blow outs hurled into an expense of noise rock sprawl, a furious roiling concoction of psychedelic skree and smoldering deconstructed riffage, that eventually gives way to a surprisingly serene stretch of murky whir.
The closer is another downtuned noise rock murk fest. This one WAY heavier on the low end sprawl, lots of crashing percussion, splattery snare, cymbal sizzle, all draped over a slow lava-like crawl of doomy riffage, and all of THAT, wrapped in thick swirls of crumbling distortion.
While this is definitely heavy, it seems like this stuff might be a bit abstract for most metalheads, but fans of stuff like Heavy Winged, White Heaven, Fushitsusha, Dead C and the like will most likely dig big time!
SUPER LIMITED. ONLY 73 COPIES!!!! Packaged in a full color, oversized jacket, with a full color insert, housed in a plastic sleeve, with two crossed twigs like nature's crossbones!
MPEG Stream: "Discombulated By Blasphemy"
MPEG Stream: "Necroglacial Enema"

BEHRENS, M. Contraction (Digital Narcis) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
After a handful of releases on Bernhard Gunter's label Trente Oiseaux, M. Behrens turns to the exceptional Japanese label Digital Narcis. Here his precessed environmental recordings take on a particularly artificial quality through a use of digital distortion and timestretching, altering the exaggerated microscopic striations and air-duct drones to otherworldly sounds, beyond the original sources of frogs, insects, and owls. 'This new Behrens is the best work I've heard from him to date!' - Vital Weekly / Staalplaat

BEHRENS, M. Elapsed Time (Intransitive) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
For his "Elapsed Time" album, the German ultra-minimalist Marc Behrens uncovered a handful of his old cassettes of field recordings and compositions for analogue synthesizer, which he then ran through his current studio set up of digital signal processing. The original recordings date back to the late '80s and early '90s when Behrens had begun to wonder if the technology that he had been using for his recordings may have been the by-products of the military-industrial complex, and thus his responses and applications of his equipment were imbued with a rising paranoia. These reprocessed compositions for "Elapsed Time" draw heavily from Behrens' paranoia with an opening track of very quiet tremolo droning with randomly shifting tones, sounding like one of Maurizio Bianchi's late-period albums played very quietly down a long hallway. Behrens' field recordings are quite often documentations of active spaces in which he was smashing glass, hammering a large piece of metal on the floor, or dragging the piece of metal through the smashed glass, recalling the physicality of Z'ev, Test Dept, and Einsturzende Neubaten. These recordings had been chopped up with eerie Francisco Lopez grey drones, fragments of silence, and an occasional Otomo Yoshihide slow-motion turntablist backspin.
Behrens' has done well to keep his original intent of manifesting a paranoid listening environment with the original recordings, but some of the recordings do show their age from time to time (especially the sporadically used but sorely out of place Arp synth). Certainly recommended to those fans of current ultra-minimalism who have a healthy appetite for the cut-up experiments from the Industrial Culture.
RealAudio clip: "Elapsed Time 1"
RealAudio clip: "Elapsed Time 5"

BEHRENS, M. Integracao (SIRR.ecords) cd 16.98
The title "Integracao" translates from Portuguese as "Integration," which is the title of a series of microsound performances by Michael Behrens, in various locations around Europe during the past couple of years. In each successive performance, he would add material culled from field recordings of the locations where he was performing; yet, the focal elements of this series were a set of digitally manipulated recordings that Behrens made by shaking some small trees and saplings. Using various frequency and gate filters, these recordings become spiked clusters of miniscule noise events which pop into the foreground, above distant acousmatic washes and environmental rumblings. After a lengthy bit of these digitally reconstructed field recordings, Behrens gets incredibly quiet, sounding much like Gunter's "Details Agrandis", marked by extended periods of inactivity that abruptly end with tiny pricks echoed by distant drones. The album ends a little awkwardly with down pitched versions of those tree recordings looped into glitched rhythms that don't quite have the subtle multi-dimensionality of Carsten Nicolai. But quite nice nonetheless.
RealAudio clip: "Peripheral Molds"
RealAudio clip: "Integration Of Silence"

BEHRENS, M. Security vs. Freedom (edition...) 2x3"cd 14.98

BEHRENS, M. Transition (edition...) 2x3"cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
As on the preceding album "Elapsed Time" for Intransitive Recordings, German composer M. Behrens has been digging through his archival recordings and digitally reworking them. Lately, Behrens has been veering away from the delicate minimalism of his earlier work (paralleling Francisco Lopez and Bernhard Gunter), in favor of the jump-cut collage techniques employed back in the '80s by The Hafler Trio, in order to articulate a decentralized narrative through the fragmentation of time and space. Behrens' retro-grade shift is like the lowercase equivalent to electronica groups like Adult. and Fisherspooner reclaiming 'new wave'. Across this double 3" cd, Behrens contextualizes an ever shifting series of manipulated field recordings into densely collaged material with abrupt cuts between all of his transient sounds. Thus, fluctuating time-stretched textures are coupled with deep low end rumbles before Behrens forces them into muffled environmental recordings, or blisters sound from turntable grit into explosive screeches and turgid blasts of noise. Beautifully packaged, as with all of the Edition... releases.
RealAudio clip: "Decaying Study 1"
RealAudio clip: "Statics"

BEHRENS, MARC & PAOLO RAPOSO Hades (And / OAR) cd 13.98
Sourced from recordings made aboard Lisbon ferries and at the quays of Cais do Sodre (one of the neighborhoods in the Portuguese capital), Marc Behrens and Paolo Raposo have constructed an allegorical set of compositions on Hades that intentionally mirror the mythological journey in crossing the River Styx. According to the ancient Greek beliefs, Styx was a border between the Underworld and Earth; and a ferry was the only means of transportation across the river. When put into a modern context of sound art and field-recording based collage, quotidian sounds sucha as the rumble of a diesel motor as it spews crusty exhaust and the creaking of the hull against the pier takes on a much more profound significance. Behrens and Raposo have done quite a good job in highlighting particular sounds, frequencies, and vibrations from the aquatic journey in traveling through Lisbon by way of boat, as a way of transforming that experience into a sombre event of mournful bellows and anguished sighs. Yet on occasion, Hades becomes agitated with rasping clatters of mechanical noise, alluding that the end of life is certainly not an easy journey. For an album about such a portentous subject as death, Behrens and Raposo do well to concentrate upon their sounds through the lens of a minimalist conceptual framework and allow the mythological and allegorical images to flow around their well-grafted sound.
MPEG Stream: "Gate"
MPEG Stream: "Crossing Into Hades"

BELFI, ANDREA Between Neck And Stomach (Hapna) cd 16.98
So many good releases on the Swedish label Hapna, it's hard to keep up! But we didn't want to overlook this one, 'cause Italian experimentalist Andrea Belfi is one half of the duo known as Crista Pfangen, whose Watch Me Getting Back The End, an album of (in our words) "fragmented yet melodic, experimental avant-indie pop", appeared earlier this year on Die Schachtel, and got a big thumbs up from us.
As a solo artist, Belfi delves here into a weird (but successful) conceptual minimalist electro-acoustic experiment based around something about making music from ordinary household sounds. Hmm... it's an interesting house Belfi must live in! It's a dwelling of gentle drones, glitchy mystery, and shimmering, skitteringly propulsive percussion (sounding at times not unlike that recent excellent Tarentel double cd). And the neighbors doing strange things upstairs, moving furniture and stuff. Field recordings, electronics, vague voices, and regular ol' instruments mesh into a lovely bit of work here. Definitely worth investigating especially if you're into the Italian scene populated by Belfi's pals like 3/4hadbeeneliminated, Stefano Pilia, Giuseppe Ielasi, etc.
MPEG Stream: "Extraevil"
MPEG Stream: "Sleeping With Extraevil"

BELIEVER The Magic Sequence (Land And Sea) cd-r 9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Believer is the new musical project of Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery (both from Tarentel and The Drift as well as various other side projects and solo outfits including Lazarus, and Moholy-Nagy). For their debut release put out by Land And Sea, who brought us the Coconut 7" from a couple of lists ago, the duo recorded three expansive synth-based compositions that are beautifully minimal and impressionistic. Using loops, sweeping bell tones and guitar washes, the three tracks encompass a kind of melodic formlessness, beginning with a pattern and then slowly letting it dissolve into something much airier, all the while still maintaining a sense of gravity and musical purpose. A fine debut that makes us look forward to whatever comes next. Super limited to 50 copies in handsewn paper covers (that you have to rip or cut open to get to the disc!). Highly Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Nocturnal Sea"
MPEG Stream: "Carrier Wave"

BELL, NATHAN @2640 (West Main Development) cd-r 9.98
This long time aQ favorite, finally back in stock!
Another solo outing from a member of the mighty Lungfish, and another disc of looped repetitive transcendental mesmer. First Daniel Higgs, then Asa Osborne's Zomes, and now Nathan Bell, how these guys ever put together an actual ROCK band we'll never know, we'll blame it on the drummer for now, at least until he comes out with some insane raga drone solo record, then we just give up.
It makes sense though as Lungfish songs weren't like normal songs, they were like minimal loops writ large, expanded into hypnotic epics, the band locked into an incredible groove, while Higgs does his thing over the top. But it becomes more and more apparent, that all the various members of Lungfish had a thing for minimalism, for drones, ragas, for repetition, and thus we have Nathan Bell's @2640. Recorded in a massive crumbling old cathedral, plugged into a blown out amplifier, these four tracks, while played on the banjo, don't sound country, or bluegrass, or even remotely twangy, in fact they don't really sound like they were played on a banjo. The notes have a sharp attack and a quick decay, but the massive space helps them stay afloat a bit longer than normal, Bell's arrangements and compositions offering nods to Reich and Riley, the pieces nearly static, a simple melody wound up within the endless repetition. So simple and gorgeous and absolutely mesmerizing. If you dug the Higgs solo records and the Zomes, you pretty much need this too.
Limited cd-r, in a hand screened fold over cardstock sleeve with a printed insert. And of course, as always LIMITED!
MPEG Stream: "Moonsblood"
MPEG Stream: "Devil's Breath"

BELLOWS s/t (self-released) cd-r 8.98
They had us at DOOM BAND, NO STRINGS. Just drums, sax, and TUBA. That's IT. FUCKING tuba and sax, seriously, no guitar, no bass, just two horns and a drum kit, and these guys kick up a sound that dwarfs plenty of bands with axes to spare. Bellows is the perfect name for these guys, cuz the lungs on these guys must be like bellows, the horns moan and howl, the sax especially, the lead instrument, is wrapped in effects, and essential lays down some wailing, FX drenched, leads, that squeal and howl, the bands lock into killer lurching groove, the tuba, letting loose with an elephant roar low end, the sax just as often laying down a weird sheet of hiss or washed out drone, sometimes so effected it sounds like some fucked up synthesizer. And the drums, heavy and chaotic and mathy, the band locked into lurching lumbering dirges, post rocky workouts, and full on noise rock freakouts. It's a little like a marching band gone over to the darkside, some sinister assembly held in the deepest recesses of hell. The vocals are also bellowed, distorted and growled, venomous and malevolent, giving the sound a distinctly nineties East Coast noise rock Cop Shoot Cop sort of vibe. There's always a groove, but it's typically a woozy doomic one, the drums driving the sound big time, but those horns are just insane, some of the sounds they get out of 'em, on "Haunts" it's all drums and tuba, while the sax unfurls a creepy minor key melody, over and over, so hypnotic, before the track breaks down, and the low end is transformed into what sounds like a choir of throat singers, while the sax bleats and trills, and the drums just bludgeon.
There are moments, where the sound borders on jazzy, it's sort of unavoidable, but we're talking face melting Brotzmann style jazz, and that jazziness is inevitably all filtered through some crusty, creepy, blown out super distorted space doom filter, that makes these guys sound absolutely like no one else, and just as often as it gets jazzy, it gets something else, "Story Of A Giant" is all spaced out and almost waltzy, and there's no way you could tell the instrumentation, the sax unfurling shimmery psychedelic clouds of tangled melody, the tuba a thick bass throb, all wrapped in a druggy haze, and on the record closer, "Half-Life", the sax is super processed and becomes some fractured angular noisemaking machine, leading the group into an extended drone-out, all long tones, chanted vocals, swirling effects, total psych drone trip out, before finally slipping into a woozy jazzy outro, and finally a crushing chugging closing burst of ultra distorted crunch.
Fuck yeah. Came close to making this a fourth Record Of The Week!
MPEG Stream: "Haunt"
MPEG Stream: "Scratching The Wrong Itch"
MPEG Stream: "Story Of A Giant"

BELONG Common Era (Kranky) cd 14.98
There are certain sounds we can just never get enough of. Belong have always trafficked in one of those sounds, a blurred, bleary washed out droney, druggy drift, everything hazy and gauzy and pixelated, crumbling melodies, slow shifting textures, like old pop songs broadcast through broken transistor radios, or alien transmissions distorted by millions of miles of space and millions of years, every song some sort of dizzyingly smeared blown out, hushed and haunting dronescape, all thrum and shimmer, rumble and whir. It's a sound practiced by others for sure, but there is most definitely a pantheon, a royalty of sorts, and alongside Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck and few others, so too do sit Belong.
It's been maybe 5 years since their last proper full length, the gloriously abstract and distorted loveliness that was October Language, and since then, they've released a single 4 song ep, a record of covers, but of course utterly transformed, the very poppiness of the originals buried underneath layer upon layer of murk and grim and buzz and crunch, and again all stretched and blurred and smeared into these fantastical miniature epics, these avant pop flecked drones, warm and whirling and completely mesmerizing.
Looking back now, listening to Common Era, Belong's brand new full length, it's easy to say, that those covers were already hinting at a sonic shift, a move toward something more traditionally pop, a gradual approach to something more structured, more overtly pop, but the 'pop' of those songs is WAY removed from the pop found here, for Common Era has taken all that fantastic shoegaziness and shimmery ambience, and wrapped it around real and proper pop songs. Simple propulsive percussion, minimal guitar jangle, swaths of swirling keyboards, hushed breathy vox, everything reverbed and echoey and washed out, a sort of eighties style new wave minimal pop, but of course in the hands of Belong, it becomes something more ethereal, ghostly, ephemeral, druggy and dreamy.
Imagine My Bloody Valentine crossed with Tim Hecker crossed with Felt, maybe stir in some of Ariel Pink's idiosyncratic faux FM radio pop, and that's these perfect abstract, minimal chunks of lilting jangle, often buried in billowing clouds of warm swirling FX and softly distorted shimmer, but just as often, with much of the noisiness peeled back, leaving just some pure pop, and even then, it's muted and muddied, like it's being broadcast from some rift in time, a sort of blurred transmission from the past, pretty fantastic. Some of the tracks get downright spacey too, a sort of kraut flecked hypnorock, the takes the minimal repetitive psych of groups like Moon Duo or Wooden Shjips, and slathers on tons more echo and reverb, wreaths everything in blurred synth swirls, and fuzzy low end pulses, and lets the songs just sort of ooze and drift and hover, gradually becoming less and less pop, and more loose and abstract and woozy and washed out and dreamy. But ALL the tracks on Common Era never fully give up the pop. For all the droniness, and the minimal FX drenched soundscapery, this is essentially a gorgeous, albeit, strange and mysterious, pop record.
The funny thing is, since these guys are on Kranky, and their last few records were more minimal and droney and avant, this record will essentially be considered art, a sort of high brow minimalist pop music, or some sort of dronepop, and so, of course, all the folks who love everything Kranky, will no doubt dig this like crazy, as they should. But had this been a super limited cd-r, or been released on Not Not Fun or maybe Olde English Spelling Bee, this would be hailed as THEE lysergic lo-fi minimal bedroom pop jam of the year. WHICH IT IS. Too. In fact, Belong have managed to somehow make a record that's both a strange druggy lo-fi pop record, and a super abstract avant bit of poppy droney prettiness. And we LOVE it.
MPEG Stream: "Come See"
MPEG Stream: "Never Came Close"
MPEG Stream: "A Walk"

BELONG Common Era (Kranky) lp 14.98
There are certain sounds we can just never get enough of. Belong have always trafficked in one of those sounds, a blurred, bleary washed out droney, druggy drift, everything hazy and gauzy and pixelated, crumbling melodies, slow shifting textures, like old pop songs broadcast through broken transistor radios, or alien transmissions distorted by millions of miles of space and millions of years, every song some sort of dizzyingly smeared blown out, hushed and haunting dronescape, all thrum and shimmer, rumble and whir. It's a sound practiced by others for sure, but there is most definitely a pantheon, a royalty of sorts, and alongside Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck and few others, so too do sit Belong.
It's been maybe 5 years since their last proper full length, the gloriously abstract and distorted loveliness that was October Language, and since then, they've released a single 4 song ep, a record of covers, but of course utterly transformed, the very poppiness of the originals buried underneath layer upon layer of murk and grim and buzz and crunch, and again all stretched and blurred and smeared into these fantastical miniature epics, these avant pop flecked drones, warm and whirling and completely mesmerizing.
Looking back now, listening to Common Era, Belong's brand new full length, it's easy to say, that those covers were already hinting at a sonic shift, a move toward something more traditionally pop, a gradual approach to something more structured, more overtly pop, but the 'pop' of those songs is WAY removed from the pop found here, for Common Era has taken all that fantastic shoegaziness and shimmery ambience, and wrapped it around real and proper pop songs. Simple propulsive percussion, minimal guitar jangle, swaths of swirling keyboards, hushed breathy vox, everything reverbed and echoey and washed out, a sort of eighties style new wave minimal pop, but of course in the hands of Belong, it becomes something more ethereal, ghostly, ephemeral, druggy and dreamy.
Imagine My Bloody Valentine crossed with Tim Hecker crossed with Felt, maybe stir in some of Ariel Pink's idiosyncratic faux FM radio pop, and that's these perfect abstract, minimal chunks of lilting jangle, often buried in billowing clouds of warm swirling FX and softly distorted shimmer, but just as often, with much of the noisiness peeled back, leaving just some pure pop, and even then, it's muted and muddied, like it's being broadcast from some rift in time, a sort of blurred transmission from the past, pretty fantastic. Some of the tracks get downright spacey too, a sort of kraut flecked hypnorock, the takes the minimal repetitive psych of groups like Moon Duo or Wooden Shjips, and slathers on tons more echo and reverb, wreaths everything in blurred synth swirls, and fuzzy low end pulses, and lets the songs just sort of ooze and drift and hover, gradually becoming less and less pop, and more loose and abstract and woozy and washed out and dreamy. But ALL the tracks on Common Era never fully give up the pop. For all the droniness, and the minimal FX drenched soundscapery, this is essentially a gorgeous, albeit, strange and mysterious, pop record.
The funny thing is, since these guys are on Kranky, and their last few records were more minimal and droney and avant, this record will essentially be considered art, a sort of high brow minimalist pop music, or some sort of dronepop, and so, of course, all the folks who love everything Kranky, will no doubt dig this like crazy, as they should. But had this been a super limited cd-r, or been released on Not Not Fun or maybe Olde English Spelling Bee, this would be hailed as THEE lysergic lo-fi minimal bedroom pop jam of the year. WHICH IT IS. Too. In fact, Belong have managed to somehow make a record that's both a strange druggy lo-fi pop record, and a super abstract avant bit of poppy droney prettiness. And we LOVE it.
MPEG Stream: "Come See"
MPEG Stream: "Never Came Close"
MPEG Stream: "A Walk"

BELONG October Language (Carpark) cd 16.98
Belong, belong (couldn't resist) in a world of washed out sound, faded memories and blistering layers of sound. Imagine the warm crackles of Endless Summer era Fennesz, a touch of Godspeed You Black Emperor aimed at monumental peaks and valleys, a Flying Saucer Attack eyes half closed eyes half open delivery with a My Bloody Valentine shimmering layer of sound thrown in for good measure. A duo from New Orleans, Belong do a really nice job of taking from their influences but also having their own unique take on the whole gauzy smeary ambient free noise sound. Their take being a thick heady blast of sound that doesn't at all lose any of its gauzy dreaminess. October Language is that great kind of record that can take on different lives when played soft vs. loud. It allows you to enjoy it quiet, as a textural layer that you can dream beneath or drift away on top of. Or you can blast Belong and they'll take you out of your dreams, and your head and into another state completely. So nice!
MPEG Stream: "I Never Lose. Never Really."
MPEG Stream: "October Language"

BELONG October Language (Geographic North) lp 14.98
Finally this blissed out dreamy drone-y aQ favorite is available on vinyl!!
Belong, belong (couldn't resist) in a world of washed out sound, faded memories and blistering layers of sound. Imagine the warm crackles of Endless Summer era Fennesz, a touch of Godspeed You Black Emperor aimed at monumental peaks and valleys, a Flying Saucer Attack eyes half closed eyes half open delivery with a My Bloody Valentine shimmering layer of sound thrown in for good measure. A duo from New Orleans, Belong do a really nice job of taking from their influences but also having their own unique take on the whole gauzy smeary ambient free noise sound. Their take being a thick heady blast of sound that doesn't at all lose any of its gauzy dreaminess. October Language is that great kind of record that can take on different lives when played soft vs. loud. It allows you to enjoy it quiet, as a textural layer that you can dream beneath or drift away on top of. Or you can blast Belong and they'll take you out of your dreams, and your head and into another state completely. So nice!
MPEG Stream: "I Never Lose. Never Really."
MPEG Stream: "October Language"

BELONG Same Places (Slow Version) (Table Of The Elements) 12" 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
There have been a whole bunch of killer installments in Table Of The Elements' recent guitar based series of one sided 12"s: Oren Ambarchi, Lee Ranaldo, Jon Mueller, but this is the one everyone seems to have been waiting for.
Especially considering what went on with the last belong 12". We sold out in a flash, got more and then sold out again, we couldn't keep that in stock. Well, we're happy to report that this latest is just as good if not better. Whereas the other 12" was all covers, the single looooong track here is an original and it's a doozy. A warm, washed out, dreamy, delicate, gauzy blurred woozy drift of pixilated sound. Jeck, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, all those guys have nothing on Belong. If anything, Belong take those sorts of sound and transform them into something more organic, more amorphous. "Same Places" sounds almost like actual people playing actual guitars, instead of something assembled on a computer. Layered and dense, the melodies obscured by thick swells of fuzzy whir, the fact that this is the "slow version" does explain how gorgeously glacial it sounds, and how many of the tones do sound like someone with their finger on the vinyl slowing the record player down to a crawl, but all that does is let the lowend sprawl, the melodies become even more abstract, pulled apart, and slowed down to the point where their constituent parts almost separate and drift away, almost. Instead, it's an underwater whirl, everything shimmery and indistinct, the sound as you sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, but instead of getting darker, the sounds begin to glow from within, bathing you in their unearthly light. So totally gorgeous.
Pressed on thick clear vinyl. One sided, the other side with a super bad ass etching by Savage Pencil, housed in a thick vinyl sleeve, and of course, as always LIMITED!

BENEATH THE LAKE Inside Passage (Glass Throat) cd 10.98
Beneath The Lake is the new ambient drone project of Nicolas Lampert, who was one third of AQ faves Noisegate, a bay area crusty, death-drone-ambient project with two records out on Andee's tUMULt label. Beneath The Lake finds Nicolas and new partner Dave Canterbury exploring similar sonic space as Noisegate did on their last full length 'Suspended Animation', but with more emphasis on the nature of sound and a much more dense and heavily layered approach. Utilising cello, guitar, pedals, processors and environmental recordings of sea lions, water, whales, wasps, wolves, owls and wind, Beneath The Lake manage to create rumbling pulsing drones that feel somehow alive, with organic thrum and cavernous shimmers, sounds slipping in and out of the sonic landscape, sparse and desolate one moment, lush and overpowering the next. Haunting and chillingly beautiful. One of our new favorite drone records.
RealAudio clip: "Water"
RealAudio clip: "Inside Passage"

BENEATH THE LAKE Silent Uprising (Glass Throat) cd 13.98
This is record number two from Beneath The Lake, whose first record from 2002, Inside The Passage, was a huge hit around these parts. BTL is made up of Nicolas Lampert, who was one half of Oakland ambient terrorists Noisegate, who released two records on Andee's tUMULt label, and Dave Canterbury who is a fixture of the noise underground performing as Wage Class Slave. Beneath The Lake is a project based on creating soundscapes combining minimal ambient music and found sounds, with an emphasis on composing the music to compliment the sounds instead of just using the sounds as a backdrop. Where their first record focused more on nature, Silent Uprising shifts the focus a bit more toward the increasing influence of the urban landscape as cities continue to encroach on nature and change the balance forever. The record begins with the clatter of trains rushing past, the receding sound of the train is soon joined by a simple strident guitar riff, accompanied by a mournful wooden recorder. The two drift and shift and slowly build in intensity. Very reminiscent of Neurosis at their most mellow, surprisingly enough. The riff shifts and twists, shadowed by the recorders melodies eventually being joined by the sound of another train and eventually being drowned out by the roar of the wheels on the tracks. The second track is a simple, gorgeously melancholy guitar melody, slowly and deliberately picked, over a bed of crackly static that could be either the sound of rain falling or the crackle of a fire, or both. The sound on Silent Uprising is much more musical than on Inside The Passage with the drone being relegated to just one of many instruments / approaches as opposed to the very dark and slow shifting all encompassing drone of the earlier record. Here, it's -that- guitar, all dark and shimmering and reverberant, and the brooding slow building melodies that creep across the sonic landscape. It sometimes almost sounds like the slow core of Low being performed in a steel mill or a rail yard, the band struggling to be heard over the sound of rain and wind and trains and passing cars. Strangely powerful and poignant. Packaged in a gorgeous oversized sleeve with breathtaking images of winter foliage and urban landscaapes, printed in all muted browns and tans. So lovely.
MPEG Stream: "Empty Highway - Highway / City / Sheep"
MPEG Stream: "Fire And Rain - Rain / Rattlesnake / Thunderstorm / Owl"

BEPLER, JONATHAN Cremaster 2 (Bepler) cd 18.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Glacial drones, beautifully sung songs by/about a notorious killer, thousands of buzzing bees and a death metal cameo...all are elements of this gorgeous and bizarre soundtrack to one of the weirdest and biggest budget art/film projects ever, Matthew Barney's million-dollar "Cremaster 2".
We were lucky enough to get a hold of some copies of the rare soundtrack composed by Johnathan Bepler. For the most part, Bepler layers multiple atonal church organ chords with varying effects that tweak the underlying sound. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir makes an appearance as does some digitally bent country twang. But the mindblowing highlight (both here on the cd and in the film) is the massive blastbeat provided by ex-Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo as Morbid Angel's bass player and vocalist Steve Tucker sings into a phone while cloaked in bees, who also contribute much buzzing to the wall of sound.
Barney's "Cremaster" series is arguably the most important work to emerge from the artworld in the past decade. To discuss in depth Barney's convoluted symbolism and bizarre Lynch / Cronenberg / Greenaway imagery would take up far too much space even for this increasingly verbose new arrivals list, but we'll attempt a brief introduction for the uninitiated: Barney's sound / film / installation pieces are poetic and difficult allegories, centered on the growth of human sexuality and its psychological implications. "Cremaster 2" is actually the fourth in a five part series (the order went 1, 3, 5, and then 2), and is, quite crassly put, a really good dick joke. More critically put, Barney abstracts the life & times of the serial killer Gary Gilmore to portray an archetype for a pre-linguistic male figure who lacks the super-ego control over the id's proclivity for sex & violence.
Music has always played an important part in the Barney work, and Jonathan Bepler's score for "Cremaster 2" certainly does its best to support Barney's complex visual elements. If you haven't seen the film, this soundtrack will make you want to.

BEPLER, JONATHAN Cremaster 3 (Bepler) 2cd 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Without getting too much into the meta-narratives of Matthew Barney's masterpiece "Cremaster 3" which loosely has something to do with the history of Freemasons, the Guggenheim Museum, macho-minimalist Richard Serra hurling vaseline, a punk battle of the bands between Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front, video games, and multiple references to Chrysler (both the car and the building). However, we can get a little worked up about the "Cremaster 3" soundtrack composed by Jonathan Bepler (who scored the two preceding films "Cremaster 5" and "Cremaster 2.") Yes, the numerical sequencing of this series is supposed to be out of order, merely one of many convolutions of logic. As in "Cremaster 2," Bepler masterfully constructs his soundtrack out of pre-existing musical genres and recognizable codifications of sound. Gaelic bagpipes blurt a dissonant stream of polyphonic notes, theremins sadly pull a solitary croon from the ether, violins glide through sustained tones, lurid artnoir grooves further corrode Barry Adamson's dark application of be-bop, and the drones, oh the drones. Much like the Alan Splet score for David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and even some of the later Ligeti chorale pieces, Bepler dissolves all of these references into pools of droning sound which allow him to fluidly work in and out of the huge pastiche. As before, Bepler's work is totally amazing.
RealAudio clip: "Chrysler Chorale Overture"
RealAudio clip: "Initiate's Serenade"
RealAudio clip: "Crown's Overture"
RealAudio clip: "Rainbow Girls Idyll"

BERAN, GRANT The Another Ones (Postmoderncore) cd-r 10.00
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Any record bearing the legend: "All the music on this cd has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire" pretty much has to be good. Well okay, maybe HAS TO is exaggerating, but at the very least that sort of description is enough to get us very intrigued.
And in this case, it is good, but at the same time nothing at all like we were expecting.
We had imagined some sort of washed out Philip Jeck style drones, or pixelated Tim Hecker-ish soundscapes, or even the sort of crackling slow decay of William Basinski's tape pieces, but instead, Grant Beran has taken old records and some junky beat up equipment and used them to create surprisingly rhythmic tracks, utilizing various cracks and pops, and skips to fashion almost-grooves, like a lo-fi DJ Shadow sort of. The opener is all fuzzy and buzzy, but with a super driving beat, a skipping record looped into a hypnotic groove, a little bit techno, a little bit hip hop, a little creepy Goblin soundtrack, and a lot fuzzed out turntable buzz. It's not hard to imagine some clever DJ adding huge beats to this and you'd have the most fucked up lo-fi dancefloor jam ever. But we don't want to exaggerate the 'dance' aspect, it's more like the soundtrack to some lost John Carpenter movie, dubbed from VHS to VHS to home stereo to microcassette recorder until it ended up sounding like this, groove and fuzzy and murky and awesome!
The second track is much more moody and atmospheric, the rhythms an afterthought, that seem to surface randomly, while the meat of the track is deep sonorous tones, throbbing and distorted, woven into some low end melody. The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between hushed whispery ambient drone, and weirdly distorted lo-fi grooves, standout's include the buzzy electro jam of "The Man In The High Castle", the cinematic krautrocky murk of "Double Star", the almost Chain Reaction dub of "Star Collector" and the droney buzz and grind of "Gleanings".
Falling somewhere between experimental turntable soundscapery and a moody cinematic DJ record, Beran has skillfully woven sonic straw into fuzzy, stuttery, groovy gold, taking turntables and dreamdrone ambience into rhythmic places until now, as far as we know completely unexplored! WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "My Own Private Tokyo"
MPEG Stream: "Sci-Fi Lullaby"
MPEG Stream: "Here At The Western World"

BERBER OX Minor Tranquiliser (Stunned) cassette 6.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Like the Trounce cd-r, this tape finds Berber Ox taking raw field recordings and folding them into generated sounds, electronic and organic, rendering them unrecognizable for the most part, and blurring all of those into hazy atmospheric sprawls, on the surface a warm whir, a bleary shimmer, but within those seemingly slo-mo glacial streaks of layered sound lurk hushed melodies, mysterious overtones and subtle rhythmic shifts, with the field recordings occasionally revealing themselves, adding a whole 'nother vibe to the sound, humanizing the dark drift with voices or snippets of conversation, or further obscuring their provenance in the form of muted clatter, buzz, or soft industrial crunch, but even so, everything in the world of Berber Ox is further blurred into some sort of hazy otherworldliness, a muddied, murky, muted swirl of softly chaotic thrum and whir, shimmer and drift, hum and buzz, the sort of sound that is so easy to get lost in, a sonic gateway forged from dreamlike minimalism and hushed, sculpted softnoise, so darkly divine. And like the cd-r, recommended for drone explorers partial to Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright and the rest...
Packaged in cool eye popping full color J-cards in bright blue tape cases, and LIMITED TO JUST 111 COPIES!! We got a very limited number of those direct from the man himself, and we might not be able to get more once these sell out.

BERBER OX The Great Parenthesis (Stunned Tapes) cassette 6.98
Latest release from this Australian soundscaper / dronologist, another collection of self described "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", and really, no matter how many ways of describing the oddly monikered Berber Ox, we have yet to come up with a more succinctly accurate description. But while that is a pretty accurate thumbnail descriptor, it doesn't really do justice to Berber Ox's dark and surreal dronescapes. Four lengthy tracks, the shortest, 7:41, the longest a whopping 28:07, the sourced field recordings are for the most part blurred into impressionistic smears, layered tones, lush drifts of muted electrical crunch fused to shimmery soft focus chordal whir, a deft balance of grit and gristle, thrum and drift, the opener begins with some strange grinding bits of low end, almost rhythmic, which are quickly stretched out and subsumed by a whirring flow of tangled tones and blurred ambience. There does seem to be some fragments of the original field recordings, bits of click and skitter, but those elements merely add texture to the tracks glacial forward momentum. The much longer second track, is another bit of breathless shimmer, all soft swells and softened edges, it's not until well into the track, where the vibe begins to feel mildly industrial, with the background whir and hiss gradually overtaking the more melodic hum in the foreground. Darkly dreamy and utterly meditative.
The flipside begins with another short one, the awesomely titled "Bear And Vortex", which unfurls an ultra minimal rumble, that sounds almost like the wind whooshing past a microphone (and could very well be just that), and doesn't really move much beyond that, a hushed murky murmur of a track, with other haunting incidental sounds creeping into the picture, the result much like the sound of exploring some old abandoned underground bunker, a low level thrum, distant reverb drenched barely there ghostlike echoes, all softly blurred into an ultra minimal expanse of hushed grey ambience.
Finally, the record finishes off with the nearly half hour long "Kong", which again continues Berber Ox's dark and delicate exploration of some otherworldly / subterranean sound work, another dark expanse of layered softnoise shimmer, and buried melodic fragments, the field recording are most noticeable here, the occasional clang, tolling bells, what could be animal sounds, everything wreathed in a foggy sonic haze, until about three quarters of the way through, when the fog seems to dissipate, leaving something much more overtly musical, melodies become more fully formed, the background noises, almost rhythmic, the tolling bells, woven into something lustrous and lovely.
Fans of all things dark and dreamy and droney will dig this, Berber Ox definitely deserves a spot on your shelf alongside Tim Hecker, Thomas Koner, Philip Jeck, Machinefabriek and the like, assuming of course you have a very strange way of alphabetizing your records...
Printed bright yellow cassettes, housed in super colorful J-cards, limited to just 111 copies.
MPEG Stream: "Do That Twice"
MPEG Stream: "Bicycle Thief"

BERBER OX Trounce (Install) cd-r 6.98
We had never heard of the artist known by the strange monicker Berber Ox, but we got two different releases from this Australian soundscaper recently, whose music the man himself described as "weird-ass psychedelic drone/field recording/collage", which most definitely sounded right up our alley, a dizzyingly dark assemblage of sounds, found AND created, woven deftly into droney psychedelic ambience that definitely has us kicking ourselves for not hearing this stuff until now.
As Mr. Berber Ox spent much of the last few years in Japan, where most of the sounds on these two releases were in fact recorded, the proceeds from the sale of both will be donated to the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Fund, which is another reason to grab both before they're gone...
Trounce is a super limited cd-r, released with minimal packaging on the esteemed Install label, home to Peter Wright, Gareth Hardwick, Horaflora and others. And Berber Ox sounds right at home, opening Trounce with with a thick humid cloud of sound, all rumbling whirring blacks and greys, shot through with all manner of field recordings, the thick thrum eventually recedes, leaving just a low level shimmer, laced with strange burblings, distant bird calls, that gradually builds and builds into what sounds like white noise surf, fading out in a blur of what sounds like canned mall music, leading directly into the hazy sonic gauze of the lengthy follow up, a nearly static drift of muted minimal hum, but within seems to lurk all manner of low end melody, subtle sonic shifts, all in their own way affecting the texture and timbre of the thick sound surrounding them.
And so it goes, the sounds tending toward the very minimal, long tones, draped over long tones, allowed to softly pulse, and gently undulate, creating ghostly overtones, and softly submerged almost-rhythms, these streaks and blurs infused with the chitter of insects, mysterious voices, snippets of traditional Japanese folk music, muted percussion, culminating in a final 20 minute sprawl of gently roiling gloom, beginning with a soft cacophony of tolling bells, one can imagine it's those bells that are blurred into Berber Ox's gorgeously murky gloom, a gloom that is transformed into what sounds like some sort of washed out doomgaze guitar buzz for the last few minutes, hypnotically heavy, yet still somehow hushed and dreamy.
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Recommended for anyone who digs lush, minimal drift and layered low end shimmer: Chalk, Coleclough, Ora, Mirror, Monos, Brendan Murray, Peter Wright et al...
VERY LIMITED, we got these directly from the man himself, and there's a good chance these will be the last copies we can get.
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Contraception of the Gods (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
Yet another slab of crunching, crushing electronica from our friends at Fflint, brought to us (of course) by the so far infallible Berkowitz, Lake and Dahmer.
This time it's all about the drone, and no one here at AQ can argue with that. While some of the stuttering skitter and jagged glitch remain, they are surrounded by and occasionally overtaken by washes of speaker melting hum and foundation rattling rumble. Fucking amazing.
RealAudio clip: "Skeletal Articulation"
RealAudio clip: "Tones In Red"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Drain Salmon Forgery (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Besides having the greatest band name ever, BL&D whip up a malfunctioning maelstrom of stuttering, fuzzed out synth and hiccupping bursts of skull pounding glitchery.
Sputtering clicks and oscillating low end rumbles are draped over chest rattling modulated pulses, creating some of the fiercest, coolest experimental electronica we've heard in a while. Like music for that video game the devil forces you to play in hell, for eternity. Awesome.
RealAudio clip: "Homunculus"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Lunge Howler e.p. (Fflint Central) cd-r 7.98
Fflint Central is a U.K. label run by two extraordinarily nice guys and darn fine hosts (good enough to befriend a sick and bedraggled on-tour Andee and buy him Cokes). Fflint specializes in experimental electronics and harsh abstract noise. One would think that there's enough, or too much of both, but the men from Fflint have that something special (fuck-you attitude? undefinable sound? sense of humor?) that makes these records way better and way more interesting than the majority of the 'electronica' we hear these days. Fans of VV/M, Lesser and other 'troublesome' electonica will dig this stuff. Affordable CD-Rs. Go ahead and take a chance. You may regret it...
Record number two from the brilliantly named BL+D. This is a little more droney and hypnotic than the first Berkowitz record, but equally as fucked.
Spazzy organ solos degrade into super distorted, hypnotic pulsing, slowly evolving like a Charlemagne Palestine piece, albeit with a full battery of broken down machinery, malfunctioning effects, and distorted alien transmissions. Noisey but still musical, BL+D are like a thinking man's VV/M.

RealAudio clip: "Tinklebox"

BERKOWITZ LAKE AND DAHMER Tar Weasels (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
It's been almost three years now since our little musical community has been terorrized by everyones favorite serial dronesters Berkowitz Lake and Dahmer. And once again, the guys at Fflint Central, our favorite UK electronic / experimental / noise / drone label, have come up with an absolute killer (um...pun intended actually). BLD just so happens to be the duo of Barry and Tim, the men behind the Fflint curtain, and so it makes sense that BLD are probably the most musically powerful and fully realized Fflint entity. Tar Weasels is as good as anything BLD has done, the difference this time around, being that there seems to be much more of a focus on melody and texture, melodic swells, dreamy drones, gone are much of the abrasive noise and squelchy rhythms of past releases, with Weasels being a far more tranquil affair. There are rhythms, but they tend to be minimal little seismic events, or squeaking alien weirdness, present, but only in the background, while in the foreground, the world is a slow motion snapshot of an alien landscape, all shifting swirls and slow building swells, ambient, but an active ambience, static sheets of drone demarcated by little sonic imperfections, somehow wrangled into a marked musical path, guiding us through a dense and darkened world of crumbling drones, and billowing waves of rumble and rattle, a murky otherworldly vacuum, where each sound is frozen in time, and then hurled into a black hole, but instead of being swallowed up and lost, each sound is stretched into infinity, every sound pulled apart and stacked into a single, slowly slithering, gorgeously thick shimmer, occasionally cracking, sonic shards dropping onto the surface below, creating more barely-there, off kilter rhythms for BLD to bury under their warm thick blankets of bowed drones and reverberating fuzz. What else can we say at this point? If you're already a member in good standing in the church of Fflint, then you already know you need this latest Fflinty sacrament, and it you have yet to be converted, well, you can only resist for so long...
MPEG Stream: "Sky Burial"
MPEG Stream: "Cinnabar Grove"

BERKOWITZ, LAKE AND DAHMER Missionary District (Fflint) mp3-cd 6.98
Berkowitz, Lake & Dahmer have easily become our new favorite electronica renegades (having easily overtaken V/Vm, what with being more musical and less annoying (just barely) and not so concerned with inane 'concepts'). The 'Missionary District' cd is their newest offering and is only available though Aquarius. But be warned, it's not a normal cd, it's a rectangular credit card sized mp3 cd-r(om) with the new record, and a ton of other Fflint propaganda and goodies on it, and is only playable on your computer!!! That said, this is their best yet, weird and grating and beautiful and baffling. Since I don't have the technical know how to make these mp3s into real audio samples, i'll just describe each song for you in a sentence:
1. an indian soundtrack being overtaken by a bleeping hyper distorted techno marching band.
2. grinding scraping pulsing drone, like a small village being over run by snakes made out of bowed cymbals and broken samplers.
3. hissing ambience created by a choir of traecheotomy patients w/intercepted short wave transmissions interrupted by gunfire, only the bullets are Masonna cassettes.
4. skittery but smooth. like someone drugged Boards of Canada and then pushed them down the stairs, while outside BL+D tried desperately to start the getaway car.
5. shortwave, high pitch skree like a Skullflower / Sun City Girls pool party.
6. like laying prone in a pool of Rephlex 12"s while hundreds of 'electronica artists' piss on you from above.
7. ultra harsh noise over a strange man humming into a broken telephone, while Glen Branca and his orchestra try desperately to compete in the background.
8. unwrapping cellophane candies in a hyperbolic chamber, while little girls in tap shoes run laps around the room.
9. pipe fight and synthesiser fight double tag team. broadcast through a toy megaphone set on 'monster'.
So definitely, if you've bought anything or everything on Fflint, then this is obviously essential, and if you haven't yet, what the hell's wrong with you?! This is as good a place to start as any. Fucking great!

BERKOWITZ, LAKE AND DAHMER Without Chemicals He Points (Fflint Central) cd-r 9.98
The mighty Fflint Central again prove that they have cornered the market on subversive (and intelligent) electronic fuckery in the UK. Why listen to the retarded antics of V/VM or the pedestrian downtempo dreck of Boards Of Canada when you can get the best elements of both AND THEN SOME from almost any band in the Fflint stable?! The return of the 'killer' electronica threesome (actually a twosome, like the 3 piece Thompson Twins) and their imbalanced, dangerous and baffling electronica. Balancing noise and melody, BL+D craft noisy epics, with gurgling, sputtering synths, purloined Middle Eastern melodies. distant rumbles, screeching high end crunch, chopped and shuffled 20th century classical, ultra-abstract musiqe concrete, bursts of face melting noise, running water framing delicate far-away melodies, totally nonsensical, epileptic drum programming, and more strange and beautiful sounds than any two guys should be able to produce. Gorgeous, challenging, intense and completely original. If there was any justice in this world, Berkowitz, Lake + Dahmer would be the jewel in someone's electronic crown (Warp, Skam, Lo, etc...) They'll just have to settle for Andee's tUMULt label, who will be releasing their first non cd-r release towards the end of the year. In the meantime, don't miss out. You know you want to be able to say 'Oh yeah, I was into BL+D way back in February!' SO RECOMMENDED.
RealAudio clip: "Blighted Sump"
RealAudio clip: "Cyan Krilp Vipers"
RealAudio clip: "Graphic Tanquiliser"

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) cd 17.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This hot shit musique concrete album is now available on cd! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalog of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible way. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc.) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through!
Oh! The cd is super limited to 150 copies (and no, it's not a cd-r!), comes with a 9-minute bonus track (not listed on the artwork, though), and is housed in the same 12" sleeve as the LP.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

BERNIER, NICOLAS Usure.Paysage (Hronir) lp 24.00
Hot shit musique concrete found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the '50s and '60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier's work isn't nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier's work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He's aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes "Les chambres de l'atelier" towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.
MPEG Stream: "Paysages Articules No. 4"
MPEG Stream: "10 Passages"
MPEG Stream: "Les Chambres De L'atelier"

BERNSTEIN, DAVID W. (EDITOR) San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture And The Avant-Garde (UC Press) book+dvd 26.00
We apologize to tape music buffs near and far, but we shamefully snoozed on reviewing this awesome book about this music movement's seminal Bay Area based hub back in June of this year when it was first published. We thought that now would be a good time (what with the holiday gift-giving season just around the corner as well as the chillier stay-inside-with-a-good-book autumn and winter months) to give it a good ol' shout out! Better late than never, right?
Those already well acquainted will need no further explanation, but for those unfamiliar, in a nutshell, the San Francisco Tape Music Center was a vital cultural and educational meeting ground of adventurous pioneers in audio arts and science. The sonic explorations of composers Morton Subotnick (who performed an in-store presentation here a few years back), Steve Reich, Ramon Sender, Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley among others produced some of the most stunning and influential avant-garde sounds of the period in an utterly unassuming locale right here in SF. This creatively tangled web of tape-loop and tape-delay, analog synthesizers and various other electronic tentacles came into fruition back in the early '60s. These days, having been schooled by the wonderful reissued works of numerous seemingly like-minded audio renegade technicians of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, John Baker to name a few), we still can't help but conjure images of the electronic music artists of that decade donning lab coats with pocket protectors and bespectacled consternated gazes, but this 344-page book reveals just as much the kaleidoscopic opening of minds induced by sound (and in some cases substances). In fact, for those of you who were captivated by the revelatory glimpse of the LA counterculture in the '60s courtesy of the recent Source Family book (The Source: The Untold Story Of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa And The Source Family), this serves to some degree as a Bay Area counterpart (albeit perhaps somewhat less Hollywood tabloid scandalous). It's the first ever first-person retrospective of the SFTMC. Many a fond memory and occasionally a hair-raising tale were unearthed for this tome. Our current favorites include one involving wild escapades to keep the center afloat on a less than shoestring budget as well as a desperate search across a floor/sea of tape edit detritus to find an errant single note snippet using a dismantled reel-to-reel playback head!
An inspiring, fascinating and often entertaining document of interviews with and essays by all the key figures and more. This 322-page softcover tome is also packed with color and black & white photos, diagrams, drawings, and a comprehensive chronology. But wait, there's still more! A dvd is tucked away in the back which features video documentation from the 2004 Wow & Flutter: The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1961-Now festival / reunion of sorts that took place in Troy, NY.
Highly recommended!

BERROCAL, JACQUE / DOMINIQUE COSTER / ROGER FERLET Musiq Musik (Fractal) cd 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Originally released in 1973 in France by Futura Records via their SON series (which also included the wonderful "Tacet" by Jean Guerin. Futura also released otherworldly tripped-outness from the likes of Red Noise and Mahogany Brain). Recorded between '71 and '72, "Musiq Musik" saw Berrocal's introduction of his Musik Ensemble on record, combining gamelan and free jazz splendour with restraint and droneful grace. An amalgamation of eastern instrumentation (bells, Tibetan shells as well as various percussion and wind instruments), western instrumentation (just some horns), and just plain wacky instrumentation (ropes, balloons, explosives (!)), the music itself is an imaginative, lyrical journey into the landscape of the mind.

BERRY, KEITH A Strange Feather (Twenty Hertz) cd-r 16.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It's a mystery how we managed to miss the previous recordings from the British ultra-minimalist Keith Berry, because if there's any justice in the world, he should be mentioned alongside such blue-chip drone artists as William Basinski, Thomas Koner, Bernhard Gunter, and Akira Rabelais. Yeah, his work is that good! He's got the sublimely romantic melodicism of Basinski, the glacial pacing of Koner, the hushed restraint of Gunter, and, um well, he's got a copy of Rabelais' legendary Argeiphontes Lyre software in his repertoire. But Berry is no mere aggregate of previously mined aesthetics, there's plenty to his work that speaks of his own beliefs and agendas which all draw heavily from Zen philosophies. While Berry's previous work The Golden Boat (Trente Oiseaux, 2003) and The Ear That Was Sold To The Fish (Crouton, 2005) were both exceptional releases (with the Crouton album easily being the best smelling record of 2005!), each of Berry's albums makes small adjustments that add up to an improvement and refinement of his sound; thus A Strange Feather stands out a remarkable achievement. Like all of the previously cited composers, Berry's fundamental structure is the drone supreme into which he bends field recordings, subtle instrumental arrangements, and small tactile events. Like falling snow, his dreamy work drifts with a poetic chill and tranquil hypnosis through which peripheral elements tease the listener with subtle details. It's so damn beautiful.
MPEG Stream: "A Strange Feather (excerpt 1)"
MPEG Stream: "A Strange Feather (excerpt 2)"

BERRY, KEITH The Cartesian Plane (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
It's been way too long since Keith Berry has put anything out. The last time we had one of his records in stock, it was the impeccable 2005 album The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, which was housed in an oversized box filled with fragrant flower petals. On that album, Berry's somber ambient constructions looked forward to the hauntological wash of Leyland Kirby, but also ran parallel to Thomas Koner's isolationism and the miniscule musicality of the later works of Bernhard Gunter. There had been rumors of an album to appear on The Helen Scarsdale Agency; for reasons unknown, the album never surfaced. Outside of a compilation track here and there, this British artist has kept a very low profile until this breathtaking album, released as a part of Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture discs. Berry presents five extended pieces of soft-focus ambience, whose elegant suspension of sound gently bends along a majestic orbit with huge expanses of sounds undulating with ghostly melodies transmitting from way back behind Berry's dense fog. Where Kirby imbues his work with a maudlin strain, Berry's casts an eye into heart of the sublime. Something beautiful is afoot here, and at same time, the feeling is darkened and just unsettled enough. Let's hope that it's not another 5 years between albums, as Berry is too good a composer to be forgotten about! Limited to 233 copies.

BERRY, KEITH The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish (Crouton) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
In case such a declaration matters in the grand scheme of things, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is my (Jim's) Record of The Year for 2005.
That said, there is a unique facet to Keith Berry's impressionistic masterpiece that I cannot fully enjoy. You see, I have a very limited sense of smell. I've always blamed it on my pyrotechnic stunts during my college days when I would light my paintings on fire; and as grandiosely stupid as this made me look, the sensorial failings of my nose is more the result of genetics than anything I could have done to it. So when I opened the box for the first time to Keith Berry's The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, I got a small tingle as something perfumed and pleasant drifted from the contents of the box, which contained not only a CD and booklet but also a delicate pile of dyed flower petals. Those of you who are not sensorially damaged might be able to place the scent; but I simply cannot. Regardless, Berry (with the help of the fine folks at Crouton Records) engineered an amazing feat: an album with a fragrance.
For very obvious reasons, the smell-o-rama trick is not what attracts me to the record; it's the seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations that truly captured my imagination. Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter; but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas.
Given the packaging constraints, The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish is strictly limited to 300 copies.
MPEG Stream: "The Sun Rays Of Another Pale Afternoon"
MPEG Stream: "Cars Keep Passing By"
MPEG Stream: "My Backward Voyage"